Actually I do know how to smelt metal in my back yard, but that is because I'm interested in history and have a copy of the "Oxford History of Technology".  Making iron just requires stealing oxygen from iron oxide (Iron ore or rust).  Historically that was done by creating carbon monoxide, which has a greater affinity for oxygen than iron does.  The carbon monoxide comes from burning carbon as charcoal or more recently coke, which is coal purified of the elements besides carbon by partial burning.  Charcoal is the same thing starting from wood.  You burn either in a furnace with sufficient air supply to raise the temperature above the melting point of iron, but not so much air all the carbon goes to CO2, you want some CO from incomplete combustion.  The iron will collect at the bottom of the furnace because it's heavy.  You layer in charcoal/coke with iron ore.  In a backyard version it will run in batches.  Modern blast furnaces are just bigger versions of this device, with conditions optimized and designed to run continuously.

So, starting from nothing, you make some clay bricks by hand, and fire the bricks by building a fire around/under them, or, alternately dig out a vertical shaft in a hillside of suitable rock and fire it from inside.  You need a horizontal opening near the bottom to feed air.  Stack the bricks in a chimney like arrangement with an opening near the bottom, and surround with more dirt for support and insulation.  Make a box bellows from wood boards and a clay pipe to feed more air into the furnace.  Load charcoal/coke and ore in layers, and fire it up.  A little limestone added in helps collect impurities into the slag that floats on top of the iron (it's less dense), but it's not required.  If you do it right, the iron will collect at the bottom of the furnace.  Your air inlet should be a little above the bottom, and the bottom bowl shaped.  Once you have two lumps of iron, one can be your anvil, and the other attached to a stick to be a hammer.  You can re-melt your iron in a clay crucible and pour it into a mold to make stock shapes.

Making straight edges requires making three rulers, which you test against each other in succession.  If no light shines between them then they are all straight. If there is a curve, then A may match B and C individually, but then B and C will not match when you flip B over, because you have now mirrored any deviation from an ideal straight line.  When you have one edge straight, you can make the other side parallel by using a fixed gage, and grinding down the spots that don't fit the gage.  With several rulers, you can make a flat surface by looking for gaps under a straight edge at different angles, and by placing pairs at opposite ends and sighting along the top to detect any twist.  Round things are easy by just mounting on a spindle and rotating.  With round and flat surfaces you are on the way to making basic machines.

All of the above may be interesting to know about, but likely irrelevant to anyone reading OSE materials on the internet or off a DVD.  If you have access to those, you likely have access to a source of electricity and steel, and can start at that level, rather then making iron from scratch.  Steel, by the way, is iron + 0.2 to 2% carbon.  The carbon makes it harder, so better for structures and tools, and enables "hardening" by a specific temperature cycle that affects the crystal structure.  It's easier to shape in the soft state (annealed) and then harden if you are making parts or tools that need to last against wear.  If we extend the the Global Village idea out to developing areas without internet/electricity/steel, which is a shrinking fraction of the world, you need to deliver the info on paper, or by mobile phone.  Something like 5.6 billion mobile connections are in use, which is not far from the 7 billion total population.  I do think we should think about minimal starting kit for developing regions, but I'm not sure if minimal means smelting ore locally.  It might mean a box with manuals and enough basic tools and parts to get started, and instructions to scrounge scrap iron, cut wood from local trees using included saw, etc.  I think a key part of bootstrapping is augmenting human power, so supply various ways to get from hand and bicycle type drives to windmill, waterwheel, solar steam, etc. drives.  Another key part is upgrading agriculture so they don't have to spend 100% of their time just staying fed.  You need surplus time after feeding yourself to work on anything else.  So maybe your starter kit includes seeds for fruit and nut trees, or a plow blade.  I can't say exactly what, but it's worth thinking about.

Could you link to a copy of the Oxford history of technology you mention? I can't find anything by that name.

All of that is EXACTLY what I mean about filling in the gaps. It's not about being ornery and doing everythind yourself "just because." It's about figuring out where you can compress the industrial system into a smaller footprint. Maybe some things just plain work better as massive, centralized facilities. I have a hard time believing these little 200-person OSE franchises are going to be able to produce everything they need. There are plenty of exotic "vitamins" that are impossible to make; you have to just dig through enough stuff to find them. That means mining and that means not only do you have to settle in a place with concentrations of those elements, but you have to devote people and space to digging them up.

Is that just an old-and-busted paradigm? Is it possible to get all the iron ore you need out of a little mine if you're clever enough? I dunno.

Maybe it doesn't even make sense to focus on iron and aluminum. Maybe if self-sufficiency is that important we should go back to copper and bronze. The Iron Age didn't come until later, after all. There's a lot you can do with metals that are easier to gather and work with. So, in the same way grass pellets aren't as energy dense as fossil fuels, but they are prefferable because they can be sourced and refined locally, maybe OSE should work on local bronze production.

The sort of information we'd be looking for is old enough it's free http://www.farlang.com/gemstones/agricola-metallica/page_001

You can go either direction. Since we're starting in the middle we can go up and down the tech curve at the same time.

Thanks, I just added it to my birthday list :)

I guess I was thinking noise/air pollution in general and zoning in particular. For example, my understanding is that it's pretty common for zoning to prohibit more than a certain number of adults from living in the same house without having a renter/rentee type of relationship. That could put an upper limit on efficiencies of scale at an OSE-type village. No dorms, for example. Maybe the structure could just be a low-cost co-op or something.

@Allen15 - I take it as a given that in city areas an OSE project would have to be a "community fabrication shop" located in a properly zoned area like warehouse or industrial.  You might have individuals sharing the space, each with a sub-area they can close off, but having people in proximity helps with delivery and mass purchase of supplies.  Even so much as running a circular saw in your garage on a regular basis can piss off overly sensitive neighbors in standard suburbs.  For growing food, I assume you would get land further out.  Factor-E Farm appears to be in a rural/agricultural area, so those kind of issues don't come up.

The zoning rules are there for sound reasons.  The sizing of water supply and sewer systems are based on a certain number of people using the system.  If you are determined to stay where you are, about all I can suggest is doing an attached greenhouse and calling it a "sun room", or building as high a fence as you are allowed, and keeping the greenhouse and plants low enough to stay hidden.  But generally suburban lots are too small to grow more than a supplement of food, so concentrate on high value items.

OK, your yard is bigger than typical suburban ones, which are more like 1/4 acre.  One thing to think about is using modular construction for your greenhouse.  Then when it comes time to move to your future home, you can disassemble it and take it with you.  Modular means things like bolted together frame and glass if that's the kind of construction, so it can be taken apart, and using standard size parts and hole spacing.

Meanwhile, almost got my bootstrap drill press done.  Out of pocket cost so far is around $40-50, not counting scrap wood I had lying around.  I have started to document it in the wiki, but still need to do most of that, and testing it once I get it done.

Cool. Let us know how the Grid Beam approach works out. I've been thinking about something similar but without pre-drilling all the holes.

One of the things I was trying to figure out was how to incorporate flat sheet into the standardized grid spacing of the beams. A rather obvious way to beef up the strength of the 90 degree joints is to include a triangular piece of sheet material in between the beams. The problem is that offsets one or more beams from where they would have been if they were adjacent to each other. I was thinking if the width of the beams and the thickness of the flat sheet was chosen to compliment each other, then the holes spacing could be based on the combined measurements. For example, keep the hole spacing on the inch, but make the beams 1/8 inch thinner on each side. That way, when you put two beams next to each other, they have a 1/4 inch space between them, into which the flat sheet goes. Any time you don't intend to use a brace you just put a small 1/4 inch spacer between the beams. 

that's an important point about lego like modularity, i had a quick look on the wiki and couldn't find any obvious talk of standards and sizing - as probably the leading open source engineering project isn't it important that OSE helps to forward some standard's?  

I like the concept Matt. I'll likely be trying to employ something like this with the LifeCat (LifeTrac spin off :)

For the generic vehicle frame, the cross members have to be hot press riveted or specially button welded.  

Bolted just won't work
 * Shake and rattle will work them loose
 * Frame will twist and bend as the small gaps between bolt and hole allow movement
 * It won't be certifiable as a safe vehicle in many jurisdictions
 * Too easy for varying production errors to creep up the vehicle in poor alignment
 * Susceptible to failure when people use the wrong bolts, to the wrong torque
 * Bolting doesn't allow the reliable use of light gauge members, as the stress loads are too high in too small a surface area.

And they'll need web flanges at each end too, to prevent racking.

High tensile steel is essential for structural integrity, fuel efficiency, long life, crash crumple performance and light tare weight, which rules out scrap-sourcing the material, which is mostly mild steel.

It's not hard for no reason. It's hard because it's complex and exacting.  Hand building a machine from scrap in a farm workshop is only going to produce a relatively heavy machine, requiring regular maintenance. Good enough, but never great.  Cheap but time consuming.  Unreliable but easily fixed. Slow and heavy, but at least you've got one. So you trade lower capital cost for more time.  It still uses the same, if not more, natural steel resource.  Overall is it less burden on the planet's scarce resources? 

The key to overcoming these limitations is absolute finesse in design, and the ability to trade.   So we're at the design stage now, how can we source and apply the incredible knowledge available and required to make the right machine?   That's why machinery manufacturers R&D departments are so large. They have to be, to create useable machinery.  If it's not good enough, or as good as a competitors, people won't buy it.  Likewise in open source software, if it's not good enough, people won't use it.  Many open source software projects have withered because a superior product has emerged, usually through the brilliance and perseverance of it's new designer.  With open source price is no barrier, so people always tend to using the most superior product.

FeF is a fantasic effort. However they've dived in the deep end with making and building well before designs are complete or thorough.  That's fine for in-the-field research and practical experimentation and learning, but it doesn't scale well, and it won't help less well resourced communities use their finite and scarce resources effectively.  We can all collaborate very effectively with forums and wikis, but we're going to need to step this up to a much more complex and sophisticated level of interaction to produce viable designs.  Much more in depth material lists - potentially pages of research & reasons & specifications for each item, proper cad drawings in fine detail, stress testable software models of components.  But have we got the will, the leadership, the software tools, the capability to do these things?  Will it be worth it?

An alternative is the Mad Max approach.  Any design we come up with on here will never be substantially complete.  Energy prices are set to soar very shortly, so production of any sort of new or standardised materials specific to this project is unlikely.  That leaves everyone with the option of using what they can find in scrap, second hand, surplus or even new off the shelf.  Build crunk vehicles from what you can find and afford.   That could mean every item will be drastically different and adapted from what is available, and where does that lead us?  Perhaps the efforts on standards are more important than producing machines. Perhaps an overall design that uses common components to ISO standards would be superior, as LifeTrac's change to standard quick couplers illustrates.  Even global manufacturers use this approach, for example the new Cat world truck combines their engines with standard chassis, transmission, axle components from different manufacturers.  But then we're back to a long list of new components that as a complete package are unaffordable, even when produced in mass scale factories, with huge environmental subsidies.

So I guess we need to accept our standard of living needs to fall, our machines need to cost a lot less, not just to us individually or as communities, but to the planet as a whole. Those efficient global scale manufacturers could make simple, effective, efficient machines that cost a lot less than current designs.  Probably less even than we can make them for in our farm workshops. But will people be willing to use them now, while they can still have better ones?  Will they only look at slower, simpler machines when energy becomes unaffordable? Currently only those of us really looking hard at sustainability accept the need for lower impact ways to live.  If we choose to use the slow machines to run our farms, our costs of production are higher than the farm down the road, and we in turn have to accept a lower standard of material living, and great exhaustion for our efforts.  Perhaps we will survive when they collapse in the coming energy crisis.

Some people will always choose the easy (fossil fuel) option, no matter how high the cost to the planet or other people. We can't prevent them, or regulate them, or reign them in, because their numbers are large, the appeal is high, and they control considerable power and resources.  So we will have to endure the collapse with them. Will we better off than them?  We can't tell. The scale of the downsizing, and the height of the fall have never been seen on earth before. We don't know the trigger, the mechanism or the timing. Energy crisis, social collapse, war, famine, disease - take your pick. Any date, with 2050 being the latest possible time.  We can only confidently predict what goes up must come down, and many of those exponential graphs are getting very steep.   So we come back to the Mad Max analogy, a window into a post collapse world. He who has energy has power.   So by far the most important aspect of OSE are the means for producing energy, not what you pour the energy into.  There will be a vast surplus of idle  machines needing liquid transport fuels.  Only the most efficient of those will be chosen to use the scarce fuel resource.   A hydraulic skid steer LifeTrac certainly won't be one of those.  Only the most essential tasks will be done using that energy - crops to market, supplies home again.   OSE's efforts in biomass, steam & ethanol producing techniques should assume much more importance to our near future.

Let the planning continue!

I recently came across this neat little bit of bootstrapping on youtube and thought it was perfect for this forum thread. It is very easy to make and you could see how easy it would be to increase the power of this basic setup with other motors.

Micro wood lathe: How to make it with a sewing machine motor


Also, this could be a really inexpensive lathe for wax prototyping of tubes, rings etc...